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South Korea Will Revisit Plan To Nix Evolution References in Textbooks
After reports that South Korean had "surrendered to creationists" by removing references to evolution in several textbooks, openfrog writes with this excerpt from Science Insider that indicates the fight is still in progress: "The South Korean government is poised to appoint a new committee that will revisit a controversial plan to drop two examples of evolutionary theory from high school textbooks. The committee, to be led by insect taxonomist Byoung-Hoon Lee, a member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, has been asked to re-evaluate requests from a Korean creationist group to drop references to bird and horse evolution that they argue promote 'atheist materialism.' At the same time, about 50 prominent Korean scientists are preparing to present government officials with a petition, organized by the Korean Association of Biological Sciences, which calls for rejecting the proposed changes. 'When these things are done, I think it will turn out that after all Korean science will not surrender to religion' says Jae Choe, an evolutionary biologist at Ewha Womans University in Seoul who helped organize the petition."
Is it just me, or does anybody else get that the theocrats are seriously getting on a fetish where they attribute everything negative to non-believers?
Not to mention how they try to get us to believe they are persecuted martyrs for their faith.
I feel so dirty when I read reality and facts are discarded as some flimsy belief only to be replaced with delusions and superstitions.
I think that belief in such things in this day and age is pretty sold proof that for some starins of people there truly has been zero evolution.
According to Wikipedia:
... So my comment is: What? What's going on here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Korea
Only 53% percent of South Koreans claim any religious affiliation, and 55% of those are Buddhists.
Need some Korean person to explain.
The political proliferation of ignorance is no longer something funny, something to point at and laugh at. It is a serious problem. How do we fight it? Politicians are whores and will just pander to single issue voters.
Funny thing is, everyone is interpreting this as religion vs science. It doesn't have to be, though. Even from a religious perspective that believes in creationism, it's entirely possible that evolution is the mechanism used to create things. For a simplistic analogy, consider play dough or clay. Many religious people resent that evolution is being taught as an alternative to creationism. (I'm not picking sides here, just stating some facts. Just stating: evolution and creation can co-exist, and, here's is why some people are upset by evolutionism.)
time to get some pitch forks and end the world leadership and its 1% eleite that are destroying any chance we will have to survive on this world
i fear carl sagan was wrong when he said we have a 1% chance to survive ....this type a crap it makes it ZERO.
"If religious fundamentalists actually understood evolution, they would try to give God credit for it"
This is all the Republicans' fault ... Especially Dubya!!! Err, wait, what do you mean there aren't any Republicans in South Korea?
It's interesting that you conflate brainless illogical morons with republicans.
I do too.
While you do seem to have morons by the truckload, you don't have a monopoly on them.
Coffee time!
Genesis For The Modern Age
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Please do not be influenced by the Christian fanatics, Korea. I have high hopes for you. You have a great and glorious culture for so many years. Please do not abandon it for an inferior culture propagated by these Christian extremists who based their myths on barbaric bronze-age hebrew tribe superstitions. More power to you Korea. Listen to your scientists!
While you do seem to have morons by the truckload, you don't have a monopoly on them.
What do you mean "seem to"? Surely there's been more than enough proof.
Wait, what?
I thought I misread it, but this is actually SOUTH Korea? So much for making fun of the other side. What have we done there...
Evolution doesn't fly in the face of Religion, in many cases it actually helps it out. Teaching Evolution doesn't mean that you have to teach a godless universe, it just means you pose an alternative to the story of humanity. No one is saying that a "god" couldn't of kicked the bucket and placed the event in line for the big bang to happen, maybe Evolution took over from there. No one is saying that maybe a "god" didn't create the universe and heavens and simply put the right chemicals in place to support Evolution, all it's saying is that you need to keep an open mind.
When you study Religion and throw off the theory that we evolved your surcoming to the trap that Religion builds. Religion is there to explain what might exist beyond the known universe and that's all it really does, it's not there to force belief that in seven days ( or your own reference ), we all got placed on earth and it was good to go.
When you eliminate Evolution your giving up trying to use logic and meaning, your taking the easy way out, almost like cheating on a test, you think you have all the answers so just copy them down and don't look back!
No, I've just witnessed typical Slashdot reactionary group think too many times.
This kind of crap just gets on my nerves and under my skin. What knowledge needs to be supressed? Knowledge of explosives? Knowledge of sharp things? How much knowledge has to be removed before there is an end to this feeling that there must be a removal of knowledge?
A God threatened by knowledge is no god at all.
In his autobiography, Charles Darwin reported that he was almost denied the chance to make his historic voyage on the Beagle on account of his looks, in particular, because of his nose, which was large and somewhat bulbous. Darwin himself later used his nose, facetiously, as an argument against intelligent design, writing, "Will you honestly tell me . . . whether you believe the shape of my nose was ordained and 'guided by an intelligent cause'?"
Leonard Mlodinow, in Subliminal
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Hermeneutics is the approach one takes to interpreting a document (such as the Bible, for example). Literalism is one approach to Biblical hermeneutics in which one assumes nothing in the Bible is meant to be read allegorically or poetically. I think young-earth Creationists hold this view, which in their mind places Christianity squarely at odds with any science that gives us life older than ~ 6000 years.
I think one appealing reason for literalism is the assumption that as the Word of God, the Bible is meant to be easily understandable to every well-intentioned reader, and that's only possible if the plain reading of the text conveys the intended meaning. I.e., if you need to be a scholar of ancient Greek and Hebrew literary forms to understand it properly, something is amiss.
However, literalism is not generally accepted as a valid hermeneutic by most Christian theologians, as far as I know. I don't know all of the reasons, but I think one of them is that when read in the original Greek, Hebrew, and/or Aramaic, some books of the Bible very clearly are written in idiomatic forms of the day that most certainly were poetic or allegorical.
I think the truth is that just as a number of scientific might explain the data collected so far, so might a number of interpretations of certain parts of the Bible fit established theology, worldly observations, and hermeneutics. Those who see science (including carbon dating of fossils) as a threat to their religious beliefs may be more attached to a literalistic hermeneutic than is appropriate.
...Whining about oh how oppressed they are while actually being privileged in every conceivable manner is the big thing with fundamentalist christianists (sic) these days.
These days!? Fundamentalists can only be called such because they are stuck lamenting the loss of authority to the natural fragmentation of 'their' political hierarchy. In the realm of the church, it happens in a democratic process of discussion and the subsequent political evolution of the philosophy underpinning the belief in the desire to connect with a higher power that will ensure your comfort and survival. There's never been a universal agreement on how the world works or how to protect yourself from nature, much less death or the uncertainties of what might come next.
Christian fundamentalists anywhere, in the absence of political power, are nothing more than the next millenium's pagans, doomed to the historical backwaters of obscurity. The only problem is that the smart ones know it and try to stave off the inevitable in the vain hope that their efforts might serve as a credible argument should their assumption about Judgement day prove even remotely accurate.
"Gosh Mr. St. Peter, we thought we were doing God's work, forcing others to toe our line, even though we ignored his creation and ruined the his Garden in the process."
Sorry, God...
I may be mistaken, because I'm no paleontologist but isn't the evolution of the horse among one of the most complete fossil records to date? Same may be true for birds too. These ignorant, science-hating creationists are very annoying.
Christian churches have been blaming the ills of the world on "pagans" and non-believers for almost as long as Christianity has existed. Usually, churches lump communism, materialist, and atheism together, but easily switch sides when that doesn't work out. For example, the Catholic church in Europe allied itself with Hitler and other fascist and military dictators against the "atheistic communists", but then after the war, when that turned out to be unpopular, blamed the fascists themselves for being atheists.
It's pretty simple to see why: Christianity starts with the premise that morality and decency is identical with belief in, and submission to, God. Logically, all non-believers must be either evil or at the very least misguided. Furthermore, no matter how bad the crimes of the churches or Christians are, they are either excused or atoned for by belief in God, or the people in question are retroactively declared not to have been "true believers" in the first place.
The only thing that changes over time is the group that the church is willing to extend the label "believer" to. Sometimes, it may include all Abrahamic religions, sometimes only Christians, and sometimes only specific denominations. It mostly seems to depend on political expediency.
http://i.imgur.com/lnIee.jpg
I think that makes it clear that I disagree with removing evolution material from textbooks.
When will people realise this!? They both address the same issue: figuring out this world and all that there is beyond. It's just that science insists on testability and reproducibility while religion doesn't.
And ethics isn't separate from either. Science itself has nothing to say about ethics, but that doesn't mean scientific research and decisions shouldn't consider ethical guidelines. They should in fact.
Neither science nor religion should hamper the other, IMHO, until sometime in future both might have merged into one body of knowledge. And both should guide the other, from the standpoint of each one's strength. Really, Einstein got it spot on nearly a century ago! Why is it that the world is seeming becoming increasingly stupid and reactionary.
I've ignored the "My God is the Only True God!" variety of religion in the foregoing, as that type is nothing but dogmatism.
I mean, they see the evidence right in front of their own eyes. It is clear to every single sane south Korean that hydralisks evolve into lurkers and mutalisks evolve into guardians and devourers.
Hahahaha, no. Religion and science differ in the sense that one is looking for the truth, whereas the other claims to have found it without having looked.
The trouble with this is that it removes God so far from the personal life of believers that they may not really disagree with the idea but want to have nothing of it.
What believers want to buy into is individual personal immortality. Saying that God made the Big Bang and all went just naturally from there is something that totally is like atheism as far as they're concerned. Basically they couldn't care less how the world was created. It's themselves they're interested in.
Because clearly women are incredibly privileged in today's society and not at all the routine subjects of unequal treatment wrt. pay, harassment, threats of rape, etc. ... you fucking moron.
> I think it will turn out that after all Korean science will not surrender to religion
Right. It will surrender to politics. Some improvement, that.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
How about the age of the universe or the earth going around the sun, is that OK to teach or not ?
all religions need witches to burn and people still burn witches today, literally and figuratively.
You can't handle the truth.
Three things are pretty well established (among both psychologists and economists):
a) Perceived happiness equals actual happiness (If we look at the brain activity near pleasure centers, we notice that how happy people say they are has very strong correlation with active those areas are. So if Antti from Finland rates his happiness at 60 and Ted from USA rates his happiness at 70, it's likely that Ted is actually happier and it's not just that they would have different scale due to culture, language, social class, etc...)
b) Absolute wealth increases perceived happiness only up to about 2000 dollars a month (If we look at countries below that threshold, average income correlates strongly with perceived happiness. Above that limit, very little)
c) Relative wealth to your peers increases happiness constantly (Look at essentially any country and you can bet that the wealthiest quarter is happier that the poorest quarter, even if the poorest quarter about reaches the threshold mentioned in b)
I don't have the time to write all evidence/arguments behind the above claims but if you're interested, I do recommend either the British economist Richard Layard's book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (note: despite the name, it isn't any new age / self-help book) or getting up to date on the basics of modern psychology.
That being the case, it's a bit silly to make comparisons to medieval times and look at absolute wealth. Sure, we can say "Most of the poor no longer need to worry about starving to death in western countries" and that is a huge, happiness-increasing thing over the middle ages. But comparing their absolute wealth to aristocrats is more or less useless, because they are likely to be a lot less happy than the aristocrats (due to having low wealth and status relative to others instead of being considered the privileged elite of the society).
Also, you're pretty comfortably middle class so when people talk about the poor, they don't talk about people like you... but that's getting a bit offtopic.
Neither science nor religion should hamper the other, IMHO, until sometime in future both might have merged into one body of knowledge.
Religion is not a body of knowledge.
I think that last bit would require a seriously insecure god.
That would explain so much about the Old Testament.
Yes, let's narrow that down to the Abrahamic religions.
Thanks. That makes quite a difference, and makes the quote more of a specific allegation and less of a generalized insult.
"The underlying concept of evolution is materialism. The theory of evolution considers people's minds as a consequence of materialistic behavior, and if this is taught pupils will form incorrect understanding of the world. Pupils will end up thinking that because materials are recycled, taking lives is not committing a sin. The same can be said for abortion and selfishness."
If so, then they either misunderstand what a mind is or are worrying that teaching will not get it across appropriately (to which a cover-up is hardly an appropriate response). IMO, a human mind is a phenomenon which drops out of the operation of a human brain. A brain is not a mind. A human mind is the real target of moral rules. Moral (not legal) murder is to end a human mind outside of the exceptions to murder - not only to end the biological life of a particular individual's cells. Abortion of a an embryo which does not yet exhibit this phenomenon is not murder (this line is of course fuzzy, and most probably not a line at all but a prolonged process). The same applies to ending the life of a brain-dead patient.
All this time I had allowed myself to be convinced of the superior intellect of Asians... now if we can fan the flames of stupidity around the region, we won't have to fix our broken educational system in America to compete, we'll just have to figure out how to keep successive generations of American children from becoming even DUMBER! Then we WIN!!!
All kidding aside though, South Korea's flirtations with removal of evolution from textbooks cannot be as bad as what they already DO teach kids in their neighboring country to the north... in North Korea, for years they were taught that Kim Il Sung (Kim Jong Ill's father, and Kim Jong Un's grandpa) created the world one morning while contemplating his navel, and set all the mountains on their foundations and the seas poured he forth from the great bowl of life he turned upon his great toe a thousand years ago, eventually condescending to rule the North Koreans directly himself, before returning to the heavens he created. Seriously, though, if you remember Kathy Bates' character in "The Water Boy," and how SHE invented electricity, telling her son (played by Adam Sandler,) that Thomas Edison was THE DEVIL... they're seriously like that.
Psychological Operations (US Army PSYOPS Command) used to screw with them by dropping leaflets that had their leaders picture on them, with subversive writings on them. They couldn't legally keep them, for they had sayings written on them that were heretical to them, but at the same time they couldn't destroy them or throw them away, because having an image of the "Dear Leader" on them, no disrespect of any kind could be showed them. It put them in quite a bind. I'm sure glad I don't live on either end of that happening little peninsula.
I'd say the problem here is 'Christian' materialism - where somebody that is nominally Christian for a couple of hours on Sunday is applying some sort of financial pressure on those responsible for textbooks in South Korea to push a creationist agenda, more due to church politics than religeon. I don't see it as being paticularly Christian, more what you'd expect from a merchant in the temple.
It wasn't quite that simple. Remember the Pope from Poland? He was in all the papers so you may have heard of him. He did a few things of merit in Nazi occupied Poland in WWII long before he was Pope, as did many others.
We've long jumped the Godwin here anyway, especially since creationism has nothing to do with the Catholic Church in 2012.
Is the whole world going insane?
as opposed to theist materialism.....
First, evolution of species is still very much theory. We have yet to see a mutation that causes a species to evolve to a new species. No, fossil evidence does not prove it, we would need a lot more to make it proven. DNA may do, but obviously there are complications with getting DNA from fossils. It's a good theory, but it's not proven. We have way more proof for in species evolution, where a bird has a modified beak or a dog has a modified tail. That evolution is quite different from an ape becoming a human or a fish becoming a snake.
Since it's theory, I have no problem with it being taught _as_theory_. Many other concepts and sciences should be learned first, like chemistry/anatomy/biology. Because of that it, should probably be learned at higher education levels. Mention it, sure. Make kids memorize it and teach it as fact? Not so much.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.